Sunday Night Excitement

We went to see the pre-hipster rock band The Cult play at Irving Plaza Sunday night with another couple, and, since this was a fairly older crowd¹, I figured it would be a mellow one as well. Not so. Maybe it was the unseasonably hot and humid weather for a mid-September evening in New York, or maybe it was because the place was packed to the gills (the show was originally scheduled for the larger Roseland Ballroom), but from the upper level we saw a couple of fights on the floor, and, separately, a couple of juiced-up fellows close to the stage get bodily ejected. When the lead singer of a rock band stops what he's doing to single you ought and tell you to tone it down, that's a good indication you've gone too far. That was the case with one of the fellows who was shown the door. In any case, a good show, even if Ian Astbury chopped off some of his lyrics. Worth catching if you are into pre-hipster rock.

¹To give a sense of how long this band has been around (and to date myself in the process), the first time I heard The Cult's music was on a barracks-mate's smuggled Sony Walkman during infantry training at Fort Benning, GA in 1989. The album I heard (on a cassette tape, no less) was The Cult's third album in their then-current incarnation. So it's likely that many of the folks at the show tonight first started listening to the band in the early 80s and were older than me.